This Square in Berlin Can't Really Be Called Adolf Hitler Platz. Can It?

In January this year, a major square in Berlin began showing up on Google Maps as "Adolf-Hitler-Platz"—as if it had been named after the infamous Führer himself. Clearly a mistake. Or was it?

Imagine. You’re a tourist wandering Berlin for the first time. You’re not surprised to see streets and squares named for the city’s most famous residents and visitors: John.-F.-Kennedy-Platz, Karl-Marx-Allee, and so on. Then something odd appears on your phone map: one of the city’s largest squares appears to be named Adolf-Hitler-Platz. That can’t be Reich! I mean “right.” Can it?

On January 9, 2014, that’s exactly what happened. Berliners began noticing that Google Maps had decided that Theodor-Heuss-Platz, a major square in Berlin’s busy Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, should be named for the Führer. The media took notice in a hurry, and Google had to admit it had no idea what was going on. Later that night, the square’s correct (i.e. non-Hitler) name had been restored.

The square is named for Theodor Heuss, the first president of West Germany, but from 1933 to 1945, it was indeed named for Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s followers didn’t wait for him to die to start naming stuff for him, as is usually customary. (Luckily for him, as his legacy turned out.) Within just a few months of Hitler being elected chancellor in 1933, his supporters in cities across Germany began naming streets for him, with the count eventually getting above fifty. This Berlin square, the former Reichskanzlerplatz, was one of the most prominent. If Nazi architect Albert Speer had been able to re-design Berlin as he’d planned, Adolf-Hitler-Platz would have been the western end of the East-West Axis, one of the city’s grand boulevards.

Google apologized for the error, explaining that the square’s historical name had probably been added to their database as an alternate name, but with the chronology confused. Being the world’s new de facto map authority has been tough for Google. In 2009, their maps accidentally ceded the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh to China, which led to a minor international incident. The next year, Nicaraguan troops actually invaded Costa Rica on the strength of an incorrectly drawn Google Maps border.

The only roads in the United States with “Hitler” in the name are in Circleville, Ohio, where a Hitler family lived and farmed for decades before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Across the border in Canada, an Ontario township was named for Joseph Stalin as late as 1986, when embarrassed lawmakers renamed the township Hansen, after a local Paralympic hero—and, I can only assume, a much better role model.